Author: Helena

Tel Aviv etc.

Yesterday morning I wrote a long piece for Salon– putting in a lot more of my Dore Gold material along with the Dr. Mahmoud Ramahi material and a bunch of background stuff. I didn’t have time for lunch as I had to get out my hotel room there in East Jerusalem; anyway I was writing up a storm. Once I was done I got a cab across a Jerusalem swathed in a real storm, a dust-storm of fine yellow-grey dust, over to the massive new Central Bus Station and came down here to Tel Aviv..
I have to say Israel’s system of inter-city and intra-city buses is a real national asset: frequent, comfortable buses, well driven, with the schedules and routes all well posted; a good system for prepayment; busy, apparently safe terminals in the major cities, and designated bus lanes in most city centers to speed the buses along… On nearly every score it makes the national transit “system” in the US look totally pathetic.
… About 50 minutes after leaving Jeruslaem the bus rolled into the sixth level of the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station… I hauled my bag down two floors and got a #4 bus which brought me to the door of my hotel here near the ocean.
Then I got a call from my handler at the Government Press Office, telling me my application for a foreign press card had been turned down. Turned down! He claimed that the Boston Review, which had been sponsoring the application, “didn’t meet the guidelines” for their department because it comes out only bimonthly and therefore doesn’t count as “news” media.
He sounded really nervous throughout the whole conversation…
So then I sent an email to my editor at the CSM. She got on the case and I think it’s being handled… Keep your fingers crossed.
… This morning I had meetings with two really nice, really smart Israeli guys whom I’ve known for many years. Each meeting was set up in a cafe in a different shopping mall in a different part of North Tel Aviv. Driving out to these meetings– especiaslly the first one–was unbelievable! Mile upon mile upon mile of enormous, extremely lavish-looking apartment buildings and cranes hanging over the horizon at every aspect building yet more of the same.
Who on earth can afford to live in all these super-luxury apartments? What companies have the capital to invest in such mammoth-sized projects? This country has become so unbelievably wealthy since Yasser Arafat’s conclusion of the Oslo Accords with them in 1993 opened the door to much wider trade and investment relations with Europe and (especially) the “tiger” economies of East Asia! But for the poor old Palestinians themselves, meanwhile, Oslo brought almost nothing but further land-exprorpriations, further represssion, the deliberate fragmentation by the Israelis of much of the West Bank, continued economic dependence, insult, injury, and and penury…

Continue reading “Tel Aviv etc.”

Life, logistics, Jerusalem

I am still waiting for my Israeli press card to come through! This is a pain, as I can’t get to Gaza without it. But tomorrow I’m going down to Tel Aviv to talk to some folks there.
Shoot, I also have lots of great material for a great post about “Sunday morning in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.” But I only have time for the very short version here: Big disappointment. No transcendental music. No services at all in any of the church’s heavily contested nooks, crannies, or broader open spaces– even though I was there for a good part of the morning. Only the old game of fleece-the-tourist continued apace. Though several of the church’s soaring domes and cleverly contrived stone staircases could be described as beautiful, still, to my plain Quaker sense of esthetics the odor of idolatry far outweighed the faint whiff of sanctity. As I said: big disappointment.
(Once, I went there and there were some Armenian monks chanting on a hidden high mezzanine. That was lovely. None today.)

The Hamas perspective

Hamas Chief Whip Mahmoud Ramahi said yesterday that the party would be prepared to have the Palestinians’ ‘foreign affairs’ conducted by the (Fateh-dominated) PLO, rather than insisting that it be the responsibility of the new Hamas-led government of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
That was the main highlight of an interview I conducted in Ramullah yesterday with Dr. Ramahi, an Italian-trained anesthesiologist who is the “party whip” for Hamas’s new 74-person bloc in the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Today, I see that the WaPo’s is carrying the transcript of a phone interview that Lally Weymouth conducted with Hamas PM-designate Ismail Haniyeh. She doesn’t say which day she conducted it.
Just about everything that Haniyeh said to Weymouth tracks exactly with what Ramahi said to me. (We had asked some of the same questions, some different. My interview was, I think, broader.) But these guys certainly know how to stay on message!
Anyway, I thought I’d write a post here that summarizes what Ramahi said to me and gives some additional atmospherics about the situation in and around the PLC’s building in Ramallah.
I hadn’t previously been to this building of the PLC, which is on a nice ridge-top site close to the bustling heart of Ramullah. Security going in was ways, ways laxer than I’d expected. Actually, I’d have to say just about non-existent: there was only one bored-looking guy sitting at a desk on the far side of the foyer who looked a bit surprised when I walked in and, instead of heading straight to the stairs or elevator, headed over to him to ask where the Hamas bloc had its offices. “Third floor,” he said laconically and went back to picking his finger-nails.
Okay.
I took the stairs. The second floor landing had a huge photo of Yasser Arafat. I guess that’s where the Fateh bloc has its offices?
On the third floor landing, there were no visible decorations. I walked along to a secretary’s office and asked first of all for the new PLC speaker, Aziz Dweik. There were three female administrative people there. Two wore hijab scarves that completely covered their hair, the third wore no scarf. I sat and waited. (A good journalistic skill, wherever you are.) Fateh bloc head Azzam Ahmed popped his head in at one point and was hustled in to a meeting with Dweik. That seemed to keep Dweik busy, so after a bunch of time one of the male assistants who came in and out said I could talk to Ramahi instead. Fine by me.
Dr. Ramahi was polite and welcoming. I was kind of ready– after many long experiences in Lebanon, Iran, etc– not to shake his hand but to do the old hand-over-the-heart thing. But he walked out from behind his desk with his hand extended for a handshake. (And for what it’s worth, he has no beard.) We started a conversation, which was almost immediately interrupted… So we made an appointment to meet later on in the afternoon.
When we finally did sit down together, we spoke for about half an hour. He answered all my questions in nearly impeccable English.
My first question– also, I see, Lally Weymouth’s!– was whether Hamas had been surprised by the extent of its victory in the January 25 election.
He said,

Continue reading “The Hamas perspective”

The dog that hasn’t barked

With the whole unfolding tragedy in Iraq, few people have remarked yet on “the dog that didn’t bark” in response to all of this… This dog being… the revamped, up-and-running, almost fully capable New Iraqi Security Forces that we were all assured had many thousands of trained personnel now ready to assure the security of increasing parts of the country.
I’d love to see any reporting that is possible regarding what’s happened to the “Iraqi Security Forces” during the crisis of the past four days. How many units have split along sectarian lines? How many have been successfully deployed? In how many was a deployment attempted but failed? … All those kinds of essential figures.
Scotch-taping together something faintly “credible” called the New Iraqi Security Forces, or whatever, has been an essential dimesnion of the current Bush plan to draw down the US troop level fairly significantly before the November mid-terms… So far, the forces don’t look credible at all as far as I can see.
But we need more information.
(I note that until recently Ayatollah Sistani and other heavyweight leaders in the Shiite community have been urging their followers to join the “Iraqi” forces in response to anti-Shiite attacks. If Sistani is now urging support for tribal levies, instead, as Juan Cole has reported, we might expect to see a further large-scale exodus of Shiites from the “Iraqi” forces.)

Bush telephone, Iraq, militias

In many countries, “Bush Telephone” is a term used for the informal but rapid spreading of wild and crazy rumors.
I just read this AP story, by Jennifer Loven from Washington, that tells us that

    President Bush spoke to seven Iraqi political leaders on Saturday in an effort to defuse the sectarian violence that threatens the goal of a self-sufficient Iraq free of U.S. military involvement.

The lucky recipients of these calls were PM Ibrahim Jaafari, SCIRI head Abdel-Aziz Hakim (here once again described as “the country’s most powerful Shiite politician” – !), National Assembly president Hajim al-Hassani, Tariq al-Hashemi (of the main Sunni coalition, the Iraqi Accordance Front), Iyad Allawi, Pres. Jalal Talabani, and KDP head Massoud Barzani.
Loven wrote that a spokseman for Bush’s National Security Council, Frederick Jones, told reporters,

    “The president congratulated Iraq’s leaders for their strong leadership and their efforts to calm the situation and for their statements against violence and for restraint”…
    Bush “encouraged them to continue to work together to thwart the efforts of the perpetrators of the violence to sow discord among Iraq’s communities,” Jones said.
    … Bush pressed each of the leaders to find a way to restart U.S.-backed negotiations among Shia, Sunni and Kurdish leaders to fashion a permanent government. The largest Sunni Arab bloc in parliament [the Iraqi Accordance Front] said Saturday it will reconsider its decision to pull out of the talks if al-Jaafari follows through on promises that the government will act to ease the crisis.
    “The president underscored his support for Iraq’s efforts to build a government of national unity,” Jones said.
    Bush expressed his condolences for Wednesday’s bombing of the golden-domed Askariya Shrine in Samarra and the cycle of retaliatory attacks that followed, Jones said.
    …The White House chose to focus on the positive and disputed that there had been a resumption in violence [!].

I’d be really intrigued to know (a) How Bush knew what to say on these calls– and what his mental picture was of each of the people he was speaking to; (b) what his mental picture is of the situation in Iraq today; and (c) how these seven hard-pressed Iraqi pols each reacted to the call he received.
On a related note, I see that since Wednesday, one “big story” in much of the MSM has become, “Gosh, look at how important those Shiite militias are!” People are writing this story with a real sense of “discovery” of this (perhaps to them) previously unknown fact.
Perhaps they should have been reading JWN more closely all along. In the days after the fall of Baghdad to the US invasion forces– as today– the most burning issue in most of Iraq was the complete absence of any sense of public security or personal safety… Back on April 12, 2003, I wrote here that,

    People cannot live without personal safety, and this requires some form–whatever form it may be!– of public order. {Okay, I was still using bold then… Sorry!]
    The Americans are not so far providing it. They seem to have made little provision for doing so…
    In the north– and I mean that term in a fairly expansive sense– the Kurdish forces look poised, perhaps, to provide public order…
    In the rest of the country, I would place a strong bet on some of the Shi-ite religious organizations being well-placed to provide the public order that the people need. Under Saddam, the Shi-ite religious hierarchy was subject to all the same kinds of repression and control as, say, the Russian orthodox church under Stalin. But still, the outline of Shi-ite religious hierarchies remained. So has some form of strong Shi-ite self-identification of the 60-plus-percent of Iraqis who are Shi-ites. Plus, they have exile-based organizations just across the border in Iran, and an Iranian government that will be very supportive of them, even if in an extremely manipulative way.

Actually, the whole of that post makes eerily prescient reading today. (Also, this one, and this one from May 2003.)
I wrote the first of those three posts, I remember, while I was sitting in a hotel room in Arusha, Tanzania, on my mission to gather info about the international court established there for Rwanda… And now, here I sit in a hotel room in Jerusalem, gathering info for my upcoming pieces about the situation here in Israel/Palestine. But wherever I am, Iraq still somehow cries out for my concern.

Still in receive mode here

I hope that y’all are sitting on the edge of your chairs to see what I’ll be reporting during my time here in Israel/Palestine. It will come. But I’m still in fairly frantic receive mode, and will get stuff loaded up onto the blog as and when I can.

In memoriam, Atwar Bahjat

Atwar Bahjat, a talented and gutsy 26-year-old Iraqi t.v. reporter was killed, along with two crew members, near Samarra yesterday.
The clear implication is that she was killed purely because she was a well-known Sunni Muslim public face.
She had just finished recording a report that told the wide viewership of Al-Arabiyya satellite t.v. all about the terrible destruction of the Askariya Mosque.
The BBC report I linked to there ssays:

    A member of the al-Arabiya TV team who escaped described how two gunmen showed up as they stood in a crowd of Iraqis.
    They dragged Bahjat and her colleagues away and shot them.

At least I hope her death was quick and as painless as possible. The report also says:

    The channel named the other dead team members as cameraman Adnan Khairallah and soundman Khaled Mohsen, who both worked for the local Wassan production company.
    At least eight employees of al-Arabiya have died in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion, some of them killed by US forces and others by suspected militants.
    They are among more than 60 journalists who have fallen in the conflict, making Iraq one of the most deadly and hard-to-cover stories.

Atwar was a real heroine. I Googled her (as much as I could in this Google-restricted place that I now am) and found out the following:
She was arrested by the US forces in September 2003… But still she kept on working as a reporter.
She helped to publicize the mysterious killings of some 250 Iraqi scientists that have occurred under the aegis of the US-UK occupation.
She used to work for Jazeera and later switched to Arabiyya…
Well, that’s about it for what I learned about her. But I have huge admiration for her and for all the other young (and older) journos out there risking their lives to bring us this story.
I just hope to heck that her killing doesn’t provoke whoever’s holding Jill Carroll and the four CPTers to “retaliate” in kind.
Pray for mercy and peace for all in Iraq.

Conversations in Jerusalem, #1

My schedule here in Israel and Palestine is gradually coming together. I decided I needed to get a bit more specific in defining what I want to report while here… Well, that process continues over time, anyway, with serendipity and learning both having their effect on raw intentionality.
This morning I started working my cellphone fairly intensively. I had a good talk with my old friend Ze’ev Schiff, who gave me some good ideas of other people to talk to. He talked a little about how he sees the political situation here but we agreed that I’d try to get down to Tel Aviv next week to catch up with him in person.
I had another good (though short) talk with Naomi Chazan, the former Deputy Speaker of the Knesset from the leftist Meretz Party. She sounded extremely busy. She lives here in Jerusalem but is working very hard on the party’s election campaign– which is based in Tel Aviv. So we’ll try to get together either here or there in the days ahead.
I talked with the PA’s (former? outgoing?) Deputy Foreign Minister, Abdullah Abdullah, and arranged to meet him in Ramullah tomorrow.
I talked with a few other very interesting people, then I struck reportorial “gold” when I called the former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, whom I’ve known for many years: he suggested I go talk to him this very afternoon, which I did. I’d actually asked if he had 30 mins to talk but the interview ended up being well over an hour.
Dore is now head of something called the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which has made news in recent days by hosting public events for former Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon and for Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh who’s the commander of the “Central” Front (i.e., facing onto Jordan)… Naveh caused a big diplomatic ruckus by telling a supposedly “closed” session at the JCPA that “a dangerous axis starting in Iran, continuing in Iraq and Jordan is in the process of conception” and that, “I am not sure there will be another king [in Jordan] after King Abdullah.” Jordan’s chargé d’affaires in Israel (who had had a colleague at the event) immediately condemned Naveh’s words saying they could have a “negative effect” on Israeli-Jordanian relations.
(Naveh subsequently apologized.)
Well, anyway, the JCPA is located in a lovely old stone house in the “Greek Colony” neighborhood of south-west Jerusalem. I waited for Dore for around 5 minutes in the same conference room/library where Naveh had spoken, then went into D’s office where we talked.
Dore Gold has a very definite point of view about the nature of the current situation. It is quite clear from all the conversations I’ve had with Israelis since coming here that the successive shocks of Sharon proposing the unilateral disengagement from Gaza; him then pushing it through and implementing it; him splitting from Likud and then forming his own party; and him then suffering a serious stroke had already, as of January 24, completely changed the political lineup in the country and left much of its political class reeling… And then came the Hamas victory.
Gold’s view of the political effects of this was as follows:

Continue reading “Conversations in Jerusalem, #1”

Tragedies in Iraq

Iraq, which has now lived through 69 post-election days and still has no even faintly accountable national government in sight, witnessed a series of tragedies and tumults yesterday and today.
AP’s Ziad Khalaf has a pretty good compilation of the main ghastly things that happened there today. Primarily, the Golden Dome of the Askariya Mosque in Samarra was brought down by a small teams working around dawn with explosives… That’s the resting place of two of the 12 imams revered by Shiites in Iraq and elsewhere, and the location of one of the last known sightings of the last, ‘lost’ imam, and after news of the dome-demolition spread there were reprisal attacks on what Khalaf estimated were “more than 90 Sunni mosques” in Baghdad and the south.
At least seven people, including three clerics, were killed in these reprisal attacks.

    Added Thursday 3:30p.m. GMT: Please note that commenter Salah has put in a list of 128 “destroyed Mosques and Imams killed or assassinated”, in the Sunni community in response for the Askariya Mosque demolition… It’s in Arabic. Salah, that’s a sobering list. It would be great if you could give us a source for it.

In addition, many Shiite demonstrators blamed the US-UK occupation forces for the continued lawlessness in their country.
Khalaf wrote about Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani that he,

    sent instructions to his followers forbidding attacks on Sunni mosques, especially the major ones in Baghdad. He called for seven days of mourning, his aides said. But he later hinted, as did Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi, that religious militias could be given a bigger security role if the government is not capable of protecting holy shrines.

All in all, the current situation inside Iraq seems eerily reminiscent of the situation around a year ago… Then too in the aftermath of an election in which the US’s favored candidate (on both occasions, Allawi) did not win, there was a long and very politically unclear period of inter-administration “transition”, in the course of which the level of violence soared ominously.
There are, however, two main differences between February 2005 and February 2006:

    (1) In February 2005, the US occupation authorities still had a ‘plan’ for continued political movement forward… However flawed it might have been as a plan, still it did offer all sides the possibility of further political changes to correct the then-existent problems. Not this year. This year, the ‘government’ that comes in will be IT. It will rule the country for the next four years… And along the way it will also be (a) finalizing all those controversial parts of the Iraqi Constitution, and (b) negotiating the timetable and terms of the US withdrawal. So the stakes are extremely high!
    (2) In February 2006, Iraqis are probably even more fed up than they were a year ago with the continued US presence…

One methodological note. In Juan Cole’s account of the most recent events, he refers to the people who blew up the Askariya Mosque– as to those who killed 22 people in a bombing attack against a Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad yesterday– as “guerrillas”. I think that term gives these bombers far too much respect. In both cases, the aim was to use attacks deliberately targeted against civilian persons or objects in pursuit of some kind of (unclear) political end. I think the word for that is “terrorism”. It’s heinous when it’s used against Israelis, and it’s heinous when it’s used against Arabs.